Hey, you know what? ( Let's talk about Greta Salpeter. )

But not the normal kind, my lovelies! I would like for us to have an

OTP LOVE MEME!
Panfandom, multipairing, anything goes! Post your favorite, or one of your favorite canon moments for your pairing of choice in the comments. Comment as many times as you like, contribute as many pairings and/or moments as you like. Pictures, youtube clips, descriptions of scenes, blog entries, screencaps, anything that makes your face go :DDDDDDDD. Explain, or let the evidence speak for itself. Let the OTP love shine forth, darlings!

Pimp this elsewhere, pleeeease. I am having the kind of week where I would love to hear all about love. Here, I'll start us off: ( Pete and Patrick, why so in love? )

Hey, you know what is totally freaking awesome? Random fandom encounters! And they're so much more common for me now than they were in Due South, oh wow! (DS ILU.) I posted before about those girls who stopped me on the street for my TAI shirt, right? Well, ( yesterday I was at the poster sale on campus... )

And oh, my darlings, today I had kind of a shitty day, honestly. It wasn't great! And then I came home and fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and woke up and it was dark and neither of my roommates were home. So I put on Take This to Your Grave, and listened to it straight through. And then I put on From Under the Cork Tree, and listened to that straight through. And now I'm most of the way through Infinity on High, and I'm grinning like a gigantic dork, and just, fuck. This band makes me so happy. SO HAPPY.

One of the reasons I basically denied to everyone, including myself, that I was done with Due South fandom from about December 2006 (when I read my last DS story) through MJ 2007 (when I entered bandom), was that I honestly thought I'd never find another fandom that made me as happy as DS made me. But oh my God, I was wrong, and that makes me – I feel SO LUCKY, you guys. Wow. I had the best fandom in the entire world, and I still hope it thrives and flourishes forever, because it was so good to me - but this fandom gives me things I didn't know to ask for, and it's what I need, and it's what I love. ♥ ♥ ♥

I have Pete's lyrics swirling around in my head right now, and Patrick's lovely clear voice, and a bowl of ice cream. I think this calls for a small ( picspam! )

TELL ME ABOUT WHAT YOU LOVE! Tell me about love! Tell me about FALL OUT BOYS.

So you may have heard that some people disapprove of stagegay in bandom. I do not! ( My thoughts on this, let me show you them. )

Oh my darling flist, I THINK WE NEED TO HUG. I say this not merely because my summer, and by summer I mean "2007," hahaha sob, has been generally sucktacular; nor because today I had to open and organize four hundred and sixty-two receipts chronologically before I scanned them all to PDFs by fiscal year. I am not motivated simply by the massive and unbearable fail that has been LJ in general over the past few months, nor any of several deeply depressing wanks! No, my angels, this statement is based on the fact that I logged on just now to browse my flist, and discovered that just about EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know and love is having the worst day it is humanly possible to have. Oh my God! It is unbelievable! I have never seen such widespread unpleasantness in a 24 hour period! I AM SO SO SORRY. I LOVE YOU ALL TREMENDOUSLY. Not one of you deserves the unmitigated awful you have been receiving lately, and if you would like me to choke a bitch, please point me towards that bitch stat.

Anyway, we CLEARLY need to hug. And you know what the LJ version of a hug is: an anonymous love meme!!! Come and shout your love from the rooftops, please, and by rooftops I mean anonymous comments. Pimp this in your journal, so that you can keep on spreading the love to others like Pete Wentz with mono! IP logging turned off, in case your love is embarrassingly intense! Aaand GO.

Oh my God, I think my heart will burst from love. BRENDON URIE. He. You guys. THE TATTOO. I have been thinking about The Tattoo lately, because – I don't know, I feel like people are judging it on different criteria than I want to judge it on? I mean, people were complaining about the execution, and like, the artwork, and that just seems kind of wrong-headed to me. Because the really important thing here, I would think, is what it says about Brendon, not how it looks: we're writing this kid as a character, not putting him in a frame and hanging him on the wall. So, I don't know, I was kind of mulling it over. And then just now, seanarenay posted a picture of Brendon ( pointing to it. )

OMG. OMFG. I LOVE HIM AND I LOVE IT. And here's why, essentially reposted from my comment in her journal: ALL I needed to love this tattoo was some evidence that Brendon thinks it's awesome. Seriously, SERIOUSLY: talented Mormon kid rebels against his family and church so he can pursue his passion for music, and once he's a super-successful musician (with a band of adorable dorks who he loves), decides to get a tattoo of PIANO KEYS coming out from under his SKIN, because he LOVES MUSIC, it is PART OF HIM, and he will NEVER REGRET IT, it is permanent, it is forever, it is who he is. AND THEN HE DOESN'T REGRET IT. <33333333333

In conclusion, ( how is he even real? ) Please talk to me about how much you want to hug him forever and buy him gift certificates to tattoo shops so he can get a whole damn sleeve. And if you haven't already, go check out kissingchaos9's Top Six Reasons I Love Brendon Urie So Much I Could Pass Out.

It's times like this, when I'm curled up in bed with an empty pizza box* at 4:30 in the morning, avoiding writing a paper, that I realize just how much of a college student I really am. SIGH.

*Yeah, literally. I mean. The trash can is really far away? /o\

So hey, you know what I've been thinking about? Unironic love! Because, okay, let's just admit it: a lot of my fannish love is at least partly ironic. (Paul Gross and Ryan Ross, I'm looking at you.) I mock because I love, I promise! But there's also some of my love that is totally, completely unironic, and, well. You know who gets a lot of my unironic love right now? GERARD WAY.

Yeah, this is the ( Gerard Way Love Manifesto. )

Oh my God, that was really embarrassingly sincere. So, talk to me about unironic love, my pretties! Tell me about the last time you really seriously found yourself admiring Pete Wentz's literary skillz, or how much you would honest to God give Paul Gross a blowjob if the opportunity presented itself, or how Ryan Ross is actually kind of a misunderstood genius. I am listening! I will not judge you very much!

Well, I am now back in Chicago (brevisse, your package is coming as soon as I find out where the hell the post office is, which will be TOMORROW if I DIE TRYING), and feeling rather nostalgic for my lovely home state of New Jersey. New Jersey gets an extremely bad rap from people out of state. When you tell people you are from Jersey, many people think it is clever to say, "Oh? What exit?" (This joke, ironically, misses its mark for the simple reason that it fails to specify what highway – it's not like there's only one.)

Part of the problem here is that people tend to conflate New Jersey with North Jersey, which is, let's face it, a bit of a wasteland. Central Jersey can be gorgeous, especially along the Delaware; full of old pre-Revolutionary towns and green valleys and hordes of wild deer. South Jersey is largely farms, and the Jersey Shore is a beast unto itself – and that's not even mentioning the Pine Barrens, which are utterly weird, being made up mostly of sand and seven to eight foot tall pine trees.

But even North Jersey, with its thousands of towns spilling one into the other and rows upon rows of strip malls stretching out into the sunrise, has a peculiar charm which I think only a New Jersey native can truly appreciate. It has to do with incredible ugliness, and tastelessness, and lack of class, and pollution. It's generations of people growing up with teased hair and cynicism, never leaving the town they grew up in, working in nowhere, horrible jobs, going down the shore after senior prom – and just by living it, raising that kind of life up to something like poetry.

New Jersey is a state of contradictions: the richest state per capita, with a deeply working-class ethos; an ugly state, which births artists and musicians; an industrial state, which produces more blueberries than anywhere else in the United States; unsophisticated and ranking second for education in the country. In its honor, and because I have large rodents on the mind (I successfully signed up for muskratjamboree, AND I have paid), I give you this poem, by BJ Ward.

( New Jersey )

And, what the hell: have a song by Fountains of Wayne, a band named after a North Jersey strip mall.

Hackensack